Tag Archives: Government

With a budget that is many millions of dollars in the red, the New York City Housing Authority—North America’s largest low-income landlord—doesn’t have a lot of cash to spare. So it’s not ideal that the electricity and heating bills for its more than 2,000 buildings are much higher than they should be. The agency, abbreviated NYCHA, estimates its spends more than 40% more on energy than a typical apartment building in the city. But tackling such a large and sprawling problem and encouraging energy conservation—especially when, in many NYCHA buildings, residents don’t pay their own electric bills—isn’t straightforward. “When you’ve been doing something one way for a decade, it’s really hard to step back and see the opportunities in a different light.”

So the agency approached Mayor de Blasio’s Office of Tech and Innovation with the problem, and out of that came two new open innovation challenges launched on Tuesday. Their aim is to ferret out ideas, from the private sector, for reducing electric bills without taking away residents’ control of their own apartments and, in a smaller number of buildings, reduce steam heating bills.

The two-year, $9 million project will create a suite of algorithms that can detect multiple types of insider threats by analyzing massive amounts of data — including email, text messages and file transfers — for unusual activity.

“Drones are essentially flying–and sometimes armed–computers,” the Brookings Institution noted in a paper published last month. They’re robots who follow the curve of Moore’s Law rather than the Pentagon’s budgets, rapidly evolving in performance since the Predator’s 2002 debut while falling in price to the point where Make magazine recently carried instructions on how to launch your own satellite for $8,000.

“We don’t like the US government very much. Their boats are weak, their lulz are low, and their sites aren’t very secure. In an attempt to help them fix their issues, we’ve decided to donate additional lulz in the form of owning them some more! This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data from Senate.gov – is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem? – Lulz Security.”

In a press statement released last week, the group wrote, “We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over 1,000,000 users’ personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts.” LulzSec also claimed to have gotten hold of “3.5 million ‘music coupons,'” which the group then invited the public to “plunder.”

Their motivation, it seemed, was something other than monetary gain. But what? An introduction on their website offers a clue: “We have now taken it upon ourselves to spread fun, fun, fun… ”

The Small Business Administration said Monday that it has run through all of the $375 million Congress allocated to temporarily waive fees and boost guarantees on loans backed by the SBA’s lending programs. Businesses still hoping for a slice of the pie can get in line, cross their fingers and wait.